At NBA games, including the finals, Lenovo ThinkPads running Windows XP are used by eagle-eyed and nimble-fingered statisticians to instantly distribute stats to the in-arena scoreboards and displays via a digital television interface as well as to TV broadcasters. The stats are time-coded with the game and real-time clocks. The NBA has really automated its stats gathering and distribution system over about the past 12 years because statisticians and users of the information otherwise just couldn’t keep up with the pace of the game.

“You’re not a league unless you’ve got a statistics system,” said NBA Executive VP of Operations & Technology Stephen Hellmuth (shown left). “You’re not a digital league unless you’ve got a live, real-time data feed that can be distributed on a global basis." The laptops feed into a 100Mbps Ethernet network and send data back to a central NBA database via a T-1 so that updated information can be displayed at the NBA.com Web site, which broke its record this season by attracting more than a billion visitors (not unique) for the first time and that uses services such as those from Akamai to keep up with the demand.